A Fish Story
~ by Jim Eagleman
Field Notes
There’ s something magical about catching fish on the line. My old spincast reel is now attached to a high-tech, fiberglass rod, with a new tangle-free line. When I make a decent cast, I’ m smiling once again. I wait for the bite and soon there’ s a dip of the bobber. Off it goes, the line tracing a haphazard trail through the water. Even a small bluegill on my flyrod gives a thrill. This lightweight rod, thin and whip-like, sends small shockwaves into my hand when there’ s tension. A living creature on the other end demands my attention.
I saw the entire experience differently when I recently went fishing with my grandkids. Their excitement was contagious— about a slight drizzle, a spiderweb of line, or the“ slimy” worms in a can. Squeals of joy erupted when something jerked back; and they reeled in frantically only to have the line go limp. Taking turns on the narrow dock with lines and rods changing direction, they sometimes squawked about where to stand. Intense interest quieted the chatter.“ Pop-pop, are we gonna eat these fish?”
An early morning ichthyology class I took years ago introduced me to a different world than the terrestrial one I was there to study. At the field station on the mighty Mississippi, swift, wide moving water seemed so foreign. We loaded up shocking boats each day at sunrise to beat the heat. As the boats moved along the water with two electrodes in front
( powered by a gas generator), strange-looking creatures came up fast and flopped on the surface. Fish I had never seen before, large and grotesque with evil eyes, got handed in large dip nets back to tubs. We were asked to identify these creatures back at the field station using a dichotomous key in our text,“ The Fishes of Illinois.”
Suckers with names like redhorse, quillback, and buffalo fish; long-nosed gar; paddlefish with flat, blade-like snouts; the prehistoric sturgeon; and catfish the size of your arm, were laid out on flat trays. They almost gave me nightmares. I tried to find characteristics of each fish, while my fingertips smelled for days, wrinkled with the preservative formalin solution. A sampling of the day’ s catch was destined for the classroom back on campus. I saw them in jars on a shelf during a later term, without the color and fierceness.
Our instructor, Dr. Larry Jahn, ready for the next lecture, said,“ Hello, and how are things?”
“ Dr. Jahn, some of us in your summer class had always wondered, were you pleased there was a boat, the Jon boat, named after you?” I smiled and knew he’ d get the joke.“ Ha. It never fails,” he replied.“ I wish I had invented it.”
His field station lectures highlighted biology, habitat, behavior, and predator-prey. Like all game species, fish were a“ crop of the land,” a harvestable resource to be managed professionally. As natural resource students, we learned we worked for the resource user.
To prove that point, I was sent to a nearby group of fishermen that had been out all night.“ Eagleman, go talk to those guys, find out what they are catching,” he ordered. I left unsure about how I’ d be greeted and was a bit shaken, but I returned with good news. The class wanted to hear what I learned.“ A lot,” I said and then added,“ Oh, and we got invited to their house tonight— the whole class— to eat fish!”
58 Our Brown County • Sept./ Oct. 2023